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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

I use AI like most software people do nowadays, but I have to admit that I'm a little surprised that Linus is onboard with it. He always felt like one of the last "old school" developers...he wouldn't even touch C++!

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Linus's policy on patch acceptance covers the LLM problem: it must still be audited by a maintainer before acceptance (and thus, actually be decent code), but also, because of LLMs, be significantly produced by a human, as machine written code cannot be Copyrighted, thus, cannot be Open Source, and thus, cannot be in the kernel because it isn't open source.

Nobody is really against LLMs producing, for example, exploits for novel security bugs to assist security researchers in patching those bugs. The exploit itself does not need to be Copyrightable nor Open Source. Nor is anybody against LLMs accelerating debugging, and helping find the location and root cause of the bug; again, that is not producing the end product code, thus does not need to be Copyrightable nor Open Source.

* should be everyone's policy

> because of LLMs, be significantly produced by a human, as machine written code cannot be Copyrighted, thus, cannot be Open Source, and thus, cannot be in the kernel because it isn't open source.

...that's not how copyright works. You can't poison an open source project with code that's fully and unreservedly in the public domain, if that precedent stands for much longer and if that precedent is applied to software in a way that's even vaguely analagous to how it's applied to things that judges sorta kinda understand.

If I'm not mistaking, you can put public domain or at least BSD/MIT code into the Linus kernel which is licensed under GPLv2. Other people are then free to use that specific code under that specific license instead of GPLv2.

Also, Linus Torvalds wrote long time ago (before v2.6.12) some simple assembly routines in linux/include/asm-i386/string.h [1] which are public domain:

    NO Copyright (C) 1991, 1992 Linus Torvalds,
    consider these trivial functions to be PD.

[1]: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/v2.6.12/include/asm-i...

It will poison it if you replace all of your code with public domain code.

A small patch here and there of uncopyrightable code doesn't really matter. Years of small patches, on the other hand, could end up replacing most or all the code.

If you have the policy that all contributions have to be significantly written by a human, and thus copyrightable, you don't have to worry about whether certain files or modules or the entire project are copyrightable in the future.

> as machine written code cannot be Copyrighted, thus, cannot be Open Source

Including CC0 works as parts of works licensed in other ways is perfectly fine iirc? It's like WTFPL after all.

> as machine written code cannot be Copyrighted, thus, cannot be Open Source, and thus, cannot be in the kernel because it isn't open source.

This is wrong.

> Nobody is really against LLMs producing [...]

This is also wrong. There are very vocal people against that.

> Nor is anybody against LLMs accelerating debugging [...]

And this too.

Who is against using LLMs to find root causes of bugs?

Some people reject the use of generative AI outright. Some for moral reasons, often based on sourcing of training data, some due to environmental impact, some for concern of how society will change or even just their own job.

RAM and GPU prices.

>> as machine written code cannot be Copyrighted, thus, cannot be Open Source, and thus, cannot be in the kernel because it isn't open source.

> This is wrong.

Has this actually been litigated? It seems to one of those things where two camps think the answer is obvious, they’ve got it, but they disagree.

It has been litigated to death before the invention of LLMs. Also, the current opinion of the USCO, which is unlikely to change, is that humans must be the author of the Copyrighted work. The problem with the entire argument is both sides are trying to think like a programmer, not a laywer, but only lawyers should be trying to argue novel interpretations of the law.

I would love to see the opinion of a copyright lawyer that would be willing to bring an LLM output copyright case to the Supreme Court, their opinion must be absolutely wild.

This whole thing was most recently affirmed in the 9th Circuit case Naruto v. Slater, where a monkey used a photographer's camera to take a selfie, and the photographer claimed he owned the Copyright because it was his camera, and then attempted to extort the Wikimedia Foundation. Monkeys are clearly intelligent and actually alive (unlike LLMs) yet that still did not alter the opinion of the Judges based on the current interpretation of the Copyright Act (which clearly states only humans can hold Copyright) and all the decades of case law proceeding this case.

As for specifically GenAI, the case involving Théâtre D'opéra Spatial also moved in this exact direction: it is a Midjourney manufactured image that the prompt-giver attempted to Copyright, and the USCO rejected the application and the USCO Review Board also rejected it, however the prompt-giver has not elected to sue the USCO over this.

I recently attended an academic computer science conference. Several people I have looked up to my entire life were there, which also gives you an idea of their age (I am 40). They're all using AI. They are not mindless boosters about it, but clearly find it a useful tool in the toolbox.

On the flip side my nephews who don’t really code (i try to teach them but they are kids with everything that comes with that) go around stating things like ‘do you use ai lol!? It’s so bad!!’.

The ai discourse is reasonably fine on HN but as soon as you go outside of actual developer circles keep in mind that my young nephews and their ilk are posting memes and criticisms without real understanding. I hope they’ll catch on soon but for now be prepared to see a whole lot of ‘Linus using vibe code Linux going to crash lololol’ type of posts in the non-developer communities for a while.

I see a lot of non-technical people who both criticize "AI" and use AI heavily. Same sort of "without real understanding" you're talking about. I think software developers tend to expect a lot more consistency in people than they actually have. Software developers included, which is kind of ironic.

> be prepared to see a whole lot of ‘Linus using vibe code Linux going to crash lololol’ type of posts

I mean, we see a lot of this in the developer community as well, already.

I would guess Linus has reviewed more code than anyone else in the world, so in that sense I'm not that surprised.

I also don't think the C++ thing was out of a stubbornness for the old way of doing things, but had concrete reasons to reject it. I guess it was a little of both maybe 20 years ago.

But there's Rust in the kernel now too.

Stephen Wolfram also looks favorable to using AI in programming and he has been programming a lot. I guess the context of how these tool are used is the important part here.

He worked long enough on the code base and know what would improve it with AI

He didn't refuse to add C++ to the kernel because he is "old school". He had a list of valid criticisms. Your comment makes it sound like his refusal to use C++ was ideology-driven and not technically-sound, and that therefore he is vulnerable to making other not technically-sound decisions such as a complete refusal to use AI.

https://harmful.cat-v.org/software/c++/linus

> C++ is a horrible language. It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it's much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it. Quite frankly, even if the choice of C were to do nothing but keep the C++ programmers out, that in itself would be a huge reason to use C.

This kind of technically-sound and valid criticism ? ;)

I want to keep this parallel between C++ and LLM and replace in this quote

> LLM is a horrible tool. It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it's much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it. Quite frankly, even if the choice of not allowing LLM were to do nothing but keep the vibe programmers out, that in itself would be a huge reason not to use LLM

That actually sounds right ! ;)

This sounds like one:

    C++ leads to really really bad design choices. You invariably start using
    the "nice" library features of the language like STL and Boost and other 
    total and utter crap, that may "help" you program, but causes:
    
     - infinite amounts of pain when they don't work (and anybody who tells me 
       that STL and especially Boost are stable and portable is just so full 
       of BS that it's not even funny)
    
     - inefficient abstracted programming models where two years down the road 
       you notice that some abstraction wasn't very efficient, but now all 
       your code depends on all the nice object models around it, and you 
       cannot fix it without rewriting your app.

I don't see anything in those criticisms that are remotely unique to C++.

Linux also built up inefficient abstractions in C that are used simply because they are easy to use. Linked lists being a go-to default choice being an obvious example.

He wrote C++ code in Subsurface so it must not be too horrible.

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